The Newsstand Sophisticate

The Millions tells us of interesting books to be published this upcoming year. It’s a good list, and contains many titles I hope to read. At my current rate, however, I feel I won’t get to many of them until the next decade. This week I started reading a book (The Verificationist, by Donald Antrim) that I bought in 2001 but have only now gotten around to reading.

(It’s good, by the way. Not sure why I waited so long to read it.)

It’s been interesting seeing stories pop up about projects funded by the 2009 Recovery Act, the so-called “stimulus package.” It’s funded such an odd assortment of things, as I suppose it was designed to do. I was pleasantly surprised to come across this article, detailing a plan to renovate Sausalito, California’s Bay Model, a hydraulic scale model of the San Francisco Bay Area that allows you to see how the tides and currents work from the Sacramento River Delta to the Golden Gate. I used to love visiting this when I was a child, and though the renovation will cost $13.2 million, it strikes me as a better use of government money than the bank bailouts.

An acquaintance of mine, Margo Rabb, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on which books are most often stolen from book stores. The Bible, along with books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, are at the top of the list. As Rabb points out, the most stolen books tend to be written by men, and this is probably because the shoplifters tend to be a certain kind of young man. That young man was identified in an article Ron Rosenbaum wrote years ago on a similar theme for the New York Observer. He is “Bukowski Man”:

Bukowski Man, sort of like our anthropological forebears Peking Man or Piltdown Man, almost a special subspecies of human. You’ve probably run into Bukowski Man in one form or another. He’s like, you know, a rebel, he’s not into conventional literature, man. Because it doesn’t tell the truth. The man can’t handle The Truth, which of course is all about (and only about) getting drunk and pissing and shitting and puking and fucking and passing out, not necessarily in that order, sometimes virtually simultaneously. What else do we know about Bukowski Man? He’s probably a suburban white boy who’s never been more down and out than a collect call to his parents. Usually there’s a surfboard or a skateboard or a Frisbee involved. His dog wears a red bandanna around its neck. Oh, and yes, he’s likely to be a shoplifter.

Anyway, I find the topic of most stolen books (and cars and records and other things) fascinating, and wish papers would run a “most stolen” list next to the bestsellers.

Glenn Greenwald has a good article at Salon about the ways in which the threat of terrorism is being used by some to argue for various violations of the Contstitution and our civil rights. He also highlights the media’s complicity in stoking these fears.

I thought of the article last night when I happened to see a “teaser” on the local news for a story about the recent attempted airplane bombing. The newscaster said something along the lines of “In the wake of the recent attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines 253, Americans are increasingly worried about airport security.” It was a good reminder to always be on the lookout for weaselly abstractions in writing or speaking. “Americans,” “everybody,” “more and more people,” “sources,” and my personal favorite, usually used by politicans, “folks,” are all signals that a tendentious argument (or simple hogwash) disguised as an assertion of fact is being proffered.

Television news teasers are meant to be vague and unspecific, of course, because they’re supposed to entice you into sitting through the commercials to find out what they’re actually talking about. But it’s good to keep in mind some of the best advice I’ve ever come across, political, aesthetic, or otherwise, concerning language. From Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style:

16. Use definite, specific, concrete language. Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

It’s hard advice to live up to consistently, but our media could certainly be doing a better job of it.

Well, 2009 was a fantastically unproductive blogging year for me, though quite eventful and exhausting personally. Frightening, really, that I’ve neglected this blog for a year, and it doesn’t even seem that long. Tempus fugit and all that. This year will be different, perhaps, though again, I’ll make no promises.

I will begin the new year, though, by wishing all readers my best wishes for the year to come, and offer my endorsement for this proposal from the National Association of Good Grammar (NAGG) to say “twenty ten” instead of “two thousand and ten.”

Happy new year, everyone!